With players in control of free agency, owners like Dan Gilbert are at the mercy of the players. / Jason Miller/Getty Images

Written by

David Walker

Arts & Culture Editor @JDavidwalker

The NBA offseason has long since transcended its actual season in relevance. The building of superstar teams has garnered much more interest than their actual implementations, the transaction revered far greater than the subsequent action.

Yet our crazed need to see the status quo shaken up, for our worshipping of free agency over even everything that comes after, runs in direct conflict with our still relative discomfort with athletes’ “new-found” self-determination. It is the ‘agency’ afforded to them in free agency that, even after three decades of legal player movement, we still don’t exactly know how to react to.

You have no further to look than last year to Dwight Howard’s free agency, to the “Dwightmare” many fans and media members loved to loath. In reality, the whole ordeal lasted little over than a few weeks. They merely involved Howard meeting with his suitors, as he contemplates the biggest decision of his adult life for a week, flying back to LA to be the first to tell his former employers he will not be returning and then signing with Houston.

All in all, it’s about everything you could hope for in a superstar as he handles his free agency. But you wouldn’t know that if you were in the midst of it, with anonymous sources armed with questionable motives manipulating both journalists and the public alike into swaying this way and that.

It would be easy to condemn the “sources” or those who touted their legitimacy, but, in the end, it was us who were most culpable. Because deep down, we loved the lunacy. We loved making fun Howard’s seeming incompetence when it came to his decision-making process, we loved that he looked like he was flip-flopping, we loved deriding the whole process while relishing in its mystery.

Aside from our paradoxical love of player movement and the circus that surrounds it, we possess an inane desire to side with management’s needs instead of wrestling with the concept of a player’s autonomy. When LeBron left Cleveland, he was “betraying” his organization, and even if he may not owe them a return after their less than gracious farewell, he at the very least “owes” them a definitive answer in regards to his supposed interest.

In reality, LeBron owes no one anything, loyalty is not something inherently built into one’s rookie contract, something that binds a player at a discount to whatever team picks him, but built on a foundation of mutual trust.

Yet this has not stopped a sense of entitlement from forming over a particular star, a bond that can run deep enough for the notion of ownership to not be an absurd one.

“He was ours,” the city who inevitably loses out on LeBron will moan. “He was ours and he left us.” There is a fine line, however, between believing in an emotional tie and investing in a tangible one.

Reading back Dan Gilbert’s “farewell” letter to James in 2010, admittedly written in the throes of a heated rage, raises more than a few alarm bells over what essentially boils down to a white man of influence throwing a tirade over the autonomous actions of a black man he believed he owned. There was not just hurt there from the “betrayal,” but a deep-seeded indignation with the power a single player had over his organization.

It is an odd thing to hold the perusal of one’s best interest against a player, especially when we rarely do so for the organizations themselves. Rare is the claim that a team is being selfish for not being able to enter the luxury tax, it is almost always dismissed as something they just can’t afford.

We say that Oklahoma City could not afford to keep James Harden and lament the inevitable financial foibles of a small market team. But few think about how James Harden could not afford to play in Oklahoma City, a player with only a limited window with which to exploit his prime.

Player autonomy is the reason the offseason has become as entertaining as it is. Perhaps it is time to accept who holds the real influence in the NBA, and do away with the antiquated notion that players should be at the mercy of the teams they give relevance to.